On Thursday, June 13th, Chance was born in Emory University Hospital around 4:41 am. He was alarmingly underweight, weighing in at 1 pound 13 ounces, while the healthy weight for a baby is 7 pounds. Immediately transferred to NICU at birth, not only will Chance have a rough few first weeks, but a rough time coming to terms with his origin.

He was born to a mother who had died five months before his birth.

After millions of dollars of lobbying and rallying, the American fetus was now guaranteed birth, nevermind the consent or health of the mother – through Georgia’s LIFE act. The law states that any fetus with a heartbeat is legally considered to be a person, and terminating its life is illegal. When Adriana Smith, 30-year-old nurse and mother was declared brain dead after suffering from severe blood clots in the brain while 8 weeks pregnant, the baby still had a heartbeat. Due to the new law, the hospital could not let the baby pass with its mother.

Her body’s basic functions were supported through special machines. Without her family being asked permission to do this, her body was kept as an incubator until the baby was ready to be born. All in the name of life and nature, a woman's body was unnaturally kept alive after death.

The Mass “Ethical” Sterilization of Minorities of the 20th Century 

Eugenics is the practice and belief that there could be a race of superior humans if the ‘bad’ ones were bred out. This generally includes able bodied people of Caucasian descent. In the 20th Century, the Eugenics movement was gaining traction among scientists, social activists, and politicians. An important factor in the sudden popularity of this practice was the influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, as well as African American immigration from southern to northern cities.

Margaret Sanger, founder of planned parenthood, was a strong advocate for female reproductive rights and use of contraceptives at a time when it was considered too radical. She needed supporters and allies if she was going to get anywhere with her goals. This led her to identify herself as part of the eugenics movement in order to gain support. Her presence in the movement may have been the most key factor in the proposal of sterilizing women of color in the United States in order to ‘breed them out’. Before the movement gained traction, doctors like James Marion Sims  “the father of gynecology” already tested out these procedures through experiments on enslaved women in the nineteenth century.

The first time that forced sterilization was legalized in America was in the state of Indiana, where surgeries on inmates in prisons would be performed by Doctor Harry Clay Sharp as early as 1899. In the Supreme Court case of Buck v, Bell forced sterilization was made legal nationwide. The court ruled that the “feeble minded” didn’t have equal protection guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, commenting that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

North Carolina was one of the first states to have a voluntary sterilization law in 1960. The graph below shows effects of the original shift towards voluntary sterilization before it was put into legislation and the percent increase after it was legalized. 

Latinas, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans were also heavily sterilized by tubal litigation. By the 1960s, over a third of Puerto Rican women had been sterilized, and Latina women in California were sterilized at a rate 59% higher than women of other ethnicities. Doctors discriminatorily embraced anti Mexican immigrant rhetoric among many Californian politicians and citizens. This led to Latina women being labeled by Doctors as “sex delinquents” and “hyper fertile”, facilitating the preponderance of sterilized latinas among other women in California. The IHS (Indian Health Service) is thought to have coerced/forced a large number of Native American women into the procedure, but there aren’t many statistics to confirm the exact amount. The Native Americans needed, and still need, to stay hidden for survival given the oppression they have faced from the American government.

These laws would go on to affect so many people, as shown through the percentages and graphs, but it is also important to look at individual stories beyond the data. Fannie Lou Hamer was a civil rights leader who was involuntarily sterilized in 1961 after she went to the hospital to have a cyst removed. She protested a Mississippi sterilization bill in Washington DC, arguing that it would target African American women. Esperanza was a Puerto Rican woman living in Connecticut. She went to her doctor to ask about birth control and was recommended tubal litigation as a ‘temporary procedure’. She consented thinking it would fall out in five years.

When asked during a 1977 televised interview, Marie Sanchez, chief of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, stated that after asking around for a week in her village she was able to find 26 sterilized women. In 1977 there were only 23,000 Cheyennes. In the same interview Doctor Connie Uri, a Choctaw Cherokee, estimated through her own personal studies that around 25% of all Native American women were sterilized.

The story of how the law was finally found to no longer be ‘ethical’ is very unfortunate. Minnie Relf, an illiterate mother of two, took her daughters to an Alabama hospital in hopes of getting them birth control shots. 12 year old Minnie Lee Relf and 14 year old Mary Alice Relf were sterilized after their mother signed X on the form that she could not fully understand. People were outraged. Thankfully, in 1973, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Relf sisters. The district court ruled in favor of Relf after finding that 100 thousand to 150 thousand poor people were sterilized yearly. It was also discovered that many had been coerced because doctors would threaten to terminate their welfare benefits if they refused. 

The court declared that some sterilization regulations of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare were “arbitrary and unreasonable”, bringing some justice to the Relf sisters and millions of other women. However, the effects of the Eugenics movement and the passing of this law in the first place had done multitudes of damage that could simply never be undone. Women were stripped of the ability of choosing their futures, and given that raising a family was one of the few things a woman was culturally respected for doing at a time, victims were stripped of their honor.

The Ethics of Women’s Autonomy Today 

In conclusion, the best thing we can do for our women in America is give them the right to choose. Whether we’re forcing people to give birth or not, it sounds dystopian when cases where the state chooses the course of women's lives. Many people consider the recent overturn of Roe V. Wade to be a win, but many more consider it to be a loss.

In times like this, when morals differ on certain topics between the religious and non-religious, I often think of what my religious aunt once told me. “As a doctor, I have a duty to the fetus but also to the woman who is giving birth to it. If the woman wished not to continue the pregnancy I would fulfill my duty to her and terminate it. If she wished to give birth, I would make sure her body was healthy enough to deliver a healthy baby. Because of my faith, I am pro-life with my own body. But because I do not believe it is right to control others' lives, I am pro-choice for women as a whole.”

It takes a level of maturity in order to pursue the value of the greater good in place of your own personal beliefs. This time, it looks like it will take a few more Adriana Smith’s before others come to the same conclusion. The best we can do for now is speak out, be angry, and document these cases for other studies and articles in the future. Preservation of knowledge is the most effective form of peaceful protest.

Works Cited

Alonso, Paola. The Forced Sterilization of Women of Color in 20th Century ..., Texas Woman’s University, twu.edu/media/documents/history-government/Autonomy-Revoked--The-Forced-Sterilization-of-Women-of-Color-in-20th-Century-America.pdf. Accessed 18 Aug. 2025. 

Kekatos, Mary. “A Pregnant Brain-Dead Woman in Georgia Was Kept on Life Support. Experts Say It Raises Ethical, Legal Questions.” ABC News, ABC News Network, 19 June 2025, abcnews.go.com/Health/pregnant-brain-dead-woman-georgia-life-support-experts/story?id=122963319#:~:text=Adriana%20Smith%20was%20eight%20weeks%20pregnant%20when%20she%20was%20declared%20brain%20dead.&text=Ethical%20questions%20arise%20over%20case,raises%20ethical%20and%20legal%20questions. 

Richards, Makayla, et al. “Baby Delivered from Brain-Dead Georgia Mother Adriana Smith, Family Says | 11alive.Com.” 11alive, 16 June 2025, www.11alive.com/article/news/health/adriana-smith-baby-born-life-support-update-brain-dead-nicu/85-1fb6595c-3966-4a50-993d-0e36e05cb256. 

“Newborn Measurements.” Edited by Marianne Fraser et al., Health Encyclopedia, University of Rochester Medical Center, www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content?contenttypeid=90&contentid=P02673#:~:text=The%20average%20weight%20for%20full,first%205%20days%20after%20birth. Accessed 18 Aug. 2025.